A street sign shows the way

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A street sign shows the way

The intellect arches its eyebrows, denies it, demeans it. The intellect says, What? Are you serious? The dead do not speak. The dead are dead.

But the intellect is wrong.

I am driving to Bridgewater State University, a sprawling Massachusetts school, which was a small college when I went there. I am meeting my bonus grandson, my youngest daughter’s partner’s son, who is a sophomore majoring in criminal justice. The last time I saw Matt in person, at Christmas, he offered to show me around the now sprawling campus. We made plans to meet at two o’clock in the parking lot near his dorm on the last Friday in January. The morning of our meeting, he texted, “Message me when you get here.”

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Cherish the last like you do the first This moment that always was, won’t always be. This is it. This will not be happening again.

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Cherish the last like you do the first This moment that always was, won’t always be. This is it. This will not be happening again.

I spent an afternoon searching, not for my lost diamond ring, which was my mother’s and which — despite weeks of deep excavation — remains missing, but rather for a column I am sure I wrote sometime, but who knows when? It was one of my favorites, about last times, about how they march right past us, chests inflated, drums banging, banners flying, like a Mardi Gras parade but how, just as often, they creep, too, like a child sneaking down some squeaky stairs to steal a cookie.

Either way, disguised as clowns or spiders, we seldom notice last times. They need some PR. Or at least a viewer warning: Pay attention. Stop what you’re doing and take notice because this kiss, this hug, this handshake, this person standing in your kitchen? This moment that always was, won’t always be. This is it. This will not be happening again.

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Let's talk turkey!

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Let's talk turkey!

At first I thought, Wow. Look at this! I’m being greeted by two, clearly excited to see me, plucked from central casting turkeys clucking at my passenger door.

“Hey, guys!” I said, grabbing my purse and a gift bag holding a bottle of nice chardonnay. I got out of my car at Dedham Plaza and walked smiling toward my feathered friends. “What are you doing in a parking lot? You’ll get yourselves killed. You need to be careful.”

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How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

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How Perry Como left a Christmas song in my heart

It always begins with Perry Como. That’s what I tell my granddaughter, Charlotte. Until I hear a Perry Como Christmas song, I have no holiday spirit. But once “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” or (“There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” plays on the radio? I’m all jingle bells and holly.

And Charlotte says, “Who’s Perry Como?” And I say “Can you imagine, 60 years from now, someone asking you, “Who is Taylor Swift?”

But of course, she can’t imagine. She is only 16.

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We are living in a disconnected world

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We are living in a disconnected world

The woman wasn’t exactly shouting. But she was loud. Halfway across a room buffered by soft music and full of people who were chatting and laughing and clinking coffee cups, you could hear her anger.

Her internet wasn’t working and she was sick of it, sick of having to log in every day and not getting in! Sick of beginning every morning of her vacation having to deal with this!

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Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality

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Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality

I am about to begin my Anne Frank journal. My friend Maureen bought it for me last year when she and her husband visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The journal is red and plain, embossed with a shiny outline of the narrow building where Anne Frank hid for 761 days. Its blank pages are lined. It has a pocket in the back, which holds a 4x7-inch black-and-white photo of its young author. It will be my 40th journal. I should have more but I didn’t start keeping them until I was 46.

And yet, Anne Frank is the reason I began to write at all. I was 13 when I first read her diary. Until then, what I knew about World War II was what my mother told me, that my father had fought in it but I was not supposed to talk about it. And what I culled from black and white movies, “Pride of the Marines,” “Mrs. Miniver,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which I watched on Sunday afternoons with my mother on a small black-and-white console TV that was the centerpiece of our parlor.

Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality.

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Finding kindness in a world gone mad

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Finding kindness in a world gone mad

I fell off some machine at the gym the other day. Yes, at the gym. I finally went back. COVID had made me stop. Necessity made me return. I signed up for a few sessions with a trainer who showed me what to do. Then I went back on my own to practice what I’d learned.

That’s when I ended up on the gym floor, arms and legs askew, more embarrassed than hurt.

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Dancing down Memory Lane rouses the power of love

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Dancing down Memory Lane rouses the power of love

Chris paved the way. I didn’t know this when he was alive, how one human being would alter us, how one human being would show us a world we might have looked away from had we not known him.

This dawned on me as I sat with my family at the wedding of Chris’s grandnephew a few weeks ago. And this realization has stayed with me, that Chris McLean didn’t change just my family and me. He opened the eyes of everyone who knew him. And then everyone who knew him opened even more eyes.

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Leaving part of my heart so far away

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Leaving part of my heart so far away

I’m in Florida visiting my uncle LeRoy. He’s sleeping as I write this, although it’s nearly 10 a.m. and he is always up and about by 7. But it’s dark as night in his house. And quiet. The air conditioner makes some noise but not much. He has it set to 80 degrees.

There’s no reason for my uncle to be up early. That’s what I think. It’s a Sunday morning so there’s nowhere he has to be. And then I think there’s nowhere he has to be every morning.

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Two words to end drunk driving: Just stop

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Two words to end drunk driving: Just stop

The bedrooms are what I continue to see: Teddy bears on a child’s bed. A young woman’s calendar red-marked with celebrations planned. Back to school shoes still in their box. Running shorts tossed in a corner. Books on a night table, one with a bookmark midway. Different bedrooms full of different things, all stark and empty without the lives that gave them life.

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We lose precious things, but hold onto memories

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We lose precious things, but hold onto memories

I did not flush my mother’s anniversary ring down the toilet. I know this for sure because I have not wrapped jewelry in tissue for 44 years. It is missing, because I hid it and I have no idea where.

I flushed the necklace down the toilet. Not on purpose, of course. I’d wrapped it in tissue to keep it safe, then tucked it into the zippered part of my pocketbook where I kept lipstick and loose change. It was 1979 and I was traveling. I was protecting the necklace from thieves. No one would be able to steal it now, I thought.

And no one did.

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Lucy overcomes her fears to swirl with her curls

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Lucy overcomes her fears to swirl with her curls

I wasn’t with Lucy when she got her longed-for curly hair. Her mother took her to the appointment — which lasted for hours — where Lucy’s hair was washed and combed and cut, then set in rollers and squirted with solution. Then there was sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting, then more solution and more waiting, and washing and conditioning and drying.

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The bustle of city life descends on the suburbs

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The bustle of city life descends on the suburbs

It was a Saturday in the summer of 1962. I remember because it was the year before I would get my driver’s license.

My mother was my chauffeur, driving us home from South Shore Plaza in Braintree where we worked, she as the manager of Wethern’s, a hat shop, and I as a part-time “salesgirl” (that was the word back then) at Cummings, a woman’s clothing store.

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"Unk," says Charlotte

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"Unk," says Charlotte

A few months ago my daughter Julie was worried about her daughter, Charlotte, who, though almost two, wasn’t talking.

“Charlotte points and says ‘unk. It’s the only thing she says. She calls everything ‘unk,’” she told her pediatrician. He nodded his head and said not to be concerned but if at her next visit Charlotte still were not talking, then they would begin to look for reasons why.

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Married to the man with a plan

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Married to the man with a plan

My husband is the one for making lists. For years he’s been singing the praises of writing things down and crossing things off. It’s satisfying to draw a line through something that’s been done, he tells me. It’s exhilarating, he says.

When our children were young, his lists included chores expected of them. On Saturday mornings when they padded into the kitchen and saw him at the table, pen in hand, hunched over his yellow legal pad, composing, they groaned.

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A Mother’s Day wish to see her own again

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A Mother’s Day wish to see her own again

You know those questions that pop up on Facebook? The kind we used to ask at dinner parties, when we had dinner parties. Questions like, if you could spend a day with one person living or dead, who would it be?

For years I chose famous people because of all I could learn from them. Jesus Christ. Mozart. Queen Elizabeth II. Today, though, if asked this question, I would choose my unheralded, very much missed mother.

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Charlotte’s Sweet 16 happened as suddenly as spring

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Charlotte’s Sweet 16 happened as suddenly as spring

Hard to believe. Isn’t that what we say about time? Hard to believe it’s almost May. Where did April go? Hard to believe the boy who just left for college has already finished his freshman year. Hard to believe my daughter and her husband are about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Didn’t my husband and I just celebrate ours?

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A modern-day take on the day the music died

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A modern-day take on the day the music died

I was at the gym, hard to believe, because since COVID I’ve counted bending over to tie my sneakers a workout. But there I was, turning over a new leaf, headphones on, stretching to the music of the 1930s (I love old music), wondering what makes the wah-wah sound in these recordings. (I took a break and googled and learned that a trumpet or trombone makes the sound).

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